"These Startup Grants fund two levels of projects. As expected,
the Level I award supports projects at the embryonic stage of
development, while the Level II award funds projects that are more
advanced and nearing the implantation stage. The Grant Guidelines provide full details.

"In late March the NEH Office of Digital Humanities announced the most recent projects
to be awarded a NEH DH Startup Grant. As in the past the projects
receiving funding were diverse and promising: a workshop to assist
university presses in publishing digitally-born, scholarly monographs;
tools to convert text to braille for the visually impaired; improvements
to OCR correction technology; software adapted to enable better
identification and cataloguing of various features within illustrations
in the English Broadside Ballad Archive, a prototype application
to promote analysis of visual features such as typeface, margins,
indentations of printed books, to name a few.

"While these grant-winning projects all carry brief descriptions, they
are still in their gestation or early implementation phase. A better
sense of what this funding yields can be gleaned from the NEH “Videos of 2011 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grantees”
as well as the other online material that has emerged in connection
with these projects. The following showcases a few of the 2011 DH
Startup grantees most likely to interest EMOB readers.

"As the project’s title “New Methods of Documenting the Past: Recreating Public Preaching at Paul’s Cross, London, in the Post-Reformation Period”
suggests, this project seeks to reproduce the seventeenth-century
experience of hearing a sermon in Paul’s Cross. To do so, it employs
architectural modeling software and acoustic simulation software to
re-create conditions that will mimic those of a time in which
unamplified public speaking competed with the sounds of urban life. One
of the questions this simulation aims to answer is whether the printing
of many Paul’s Cross sermon points to their popularity among those who
gathered to hear them or, instead, to the need to distribute printed
versions because their original oral delivery was inaudible save for a
few. English professor and Project Director John Wall’s The Virtual Paul’s Cross website details the project’s objectives and its progress. The site also contains a blog
that offers occasional updates."

Then, in her response to a comment by a reader of her blog, she elaborates:

"[T]his sampling of grantees reminds us how far technology is enabling
the pursuit of projects just not possible before. Wall’s Paul’s Cross
project, for example, goes beyond merely imagining how a 17th-century
Londoner might have heard these outdoor public sermons preached often to
crowds numbering in the thousands. Instead it aims to re-create the
actual aural experience of hearing (or not hearing!) these public
performances–that is, to enable a twenty-first century person to
experience an aspect of the oral past through a simulated rendering of
it.

"As for technical expertise, these projects are a clear testament to
collaboration. Most have computer scientists or graduate students in the
field on their teams. In the case of Wall’s project, his production team
consists of an acoustic engineer, an archaeologist, a professor of
architecture, a linguist, and graduate research assistant. While there’s
no computer scientist on his team, the group nonetheless collectively
possesses the advanced expertise needed for what the project seeks to
accomplish. The 3D modeling is being handled by a graduate research
assistant who is using Google’s (well, now no longer Google but instead Trimble) SketchUp. Google, in fact, has been hosting an official SketchUp channel that
provides tutorials and other ideas for using this free 3D-modeling
software. In other words, it’s a tool that potentially anyone could
learn to use."